Open Source Editor Zed Releases 1.0: Abandons Electron, Rewritten from Scratch in Rust + GPU Rendering

According to HotFix Monitor, the code editor Zed has released version 1.0. Zed, created by Nathan Sobo's team, the founder of the Atom editor, forked Atom from Chromium to create a desktop application, which inadvertently led to the birth of the Electron framework, the foundation of VS Code. The Sobo team believed that web technologies imposed limits on editors, so they abandoned Electron. They rewrote the editor from scratch in Rust over five years, with over a million lines of code, covering Mac, Windows, and Linux. The entire UI is rendered directly by feeding data to GPU shaders, resembling a game engine. They also developed their UI framework called GPUI.

The feature set now includes all the essentials of a modern editor: Git integration, SSH for remote development, debugger, and rainbow brackets. In terms of AI, Zed supports running multiple agents in the same window concurrently, with key-level predictive editing suggestions for the next change. The open Agent Client Protocol has been integrated with Claude Agent, Codex, OpenCode, and recently Cursor.

They have simultaneously launched the enterprise version, Zed for Business, offering centralized billing, role-based access control, and team management. In February of this year, Zed completed a $32 million Series B round led by Sequoia, bringing the total funding to over $42 million. The team is currently developing DeltaDB, a synchronization engine based on CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types), tracking every change at the character level. The goal is to enable real-time code sharing among multiple individuals and agents, allowing agents to generate code in a shared context for immediate review, eliminating the need for waiting for pull requests.

Zed is open source and currently has hundreds of thousands of daily active users.